


Pretty Face and Electric Soul

by glorious_spoon



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Aging, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Future Fic, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Hopeful Ending, Immortality, M/M, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2019-11-29 02:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18217163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: “You love a mortal, Magnus. How much longer do you think he has left? A few years, if that? What do you think you’ll do when he’s gone?”*Seventy years isn't nearly enough time, and Magnus will never be ready for this.





	1. Chapter 1

It takes three incredibly frustrating days of slogging around parts of Paris that no tourist would ever come within a mile of before they manage to track their rogue warlock to a section of catacombs under the city, and by that point Magnus is so tired and aggravated that he nearly misses the fireball that sweeps around the curve of the tunnel toward his face as they approach. He bats it away at the last minute, and a few steps behind him Madzie curses under her breath in fluent and remarkably filthy French. She’s been acclimating in the decades she’s spent here.

“Well,” Magnus says out loud, belatedly manifesting an defensive aura. Behind him, he can feel the sparking fizz of magic as Madzie does the same. “I do believe we’ve found young Mr. Boudreaux.”

“You think?”

Another ten feet take them out into a large, stone-walled room. It’s lit by flickering torches set into wall sconces, and also by swirling threads of red magic, centered on the dark-haired young warlock in the center of the room. Prowling around the wall, teeth bared, lank gray hair hanging into her face, is the automaton they’ve been tracking since Asher Boudreaux stole her corpse from the morgue last week.

Magnus lets out a sigh, half-turning to meet Madzie’s eyes for an instant, and then they’re moving together as smoothly as if they’ve choreographed it, which in fact they more or less have. Magnus spins a needle-bright flicker of magic at the warlock, yanking him back toward the doorway as the automaton lunges at him, and Madzie steps forward, braids lifting off the back of her neck, a haze of golden power coalescing around her and filling the gloomy room with a light as bright as the dawn. The automaton screams, cracked and inhuman, dry lips peeling back from her teeth as she collapses to the floor, and the young warlock cries out.

“No, please! Don’t hurt her, please!”

Oh, God, Magnus thinks. The poor boy.

“She’s gone,” he says, getting his arms around Asher’s shoulders, pulling him back and freezing his magic inside his skin with a touch before he can retaliate. The boy struggles, but Magnus is older by far, stronger by far, and all his efforts amount to little more than the fluttering of a trapped bird battering itself against the bars of a steel cage. He keeps his grip as gentle as he can, but it’s inevitable that the young warlock will be bruised.

After this, Magnus is pretty sure he won’t even feel it.

“She’s not gone, she’s not, she’s _right there_ , please don’t—”

“That isn’t her. Asher, it isn’t her.” It’s no use, and he knows it. Asher isn’t in a rational frame of mind right now and hasn’t been since his wife’s heart gave out a week and a half ago. Someone should have been staying with him. When this is all over, Magnus will be having a stern conversation with the local High Warlock; Mathilde is old enough to know better. Too late now, though. 

“You should understand,” the warlock sobs. “You of all people, Magnus, _you_ should understand. Please, please don’t kill her again. _Please._ ”

“Hush.” Magnus cups his skull in the curve of his palm to prevent him from turning, holding him as carefully as can with his arms and his magic, keeping him still. “Hush, my dear boy. Don’t look.”

On the far side of the room, Madzie stoops over the writhing automaton, which spits black gore as she lifts her hands. Rheumy eyes roll wildly, without any humanity or sense in the pinprick pupils. Whatever came back in this woman’s skin, it wasn’t _her._ It never is, with this sort of thing.

Not that there’s any telling the sobbing young warlock in his arms that. God. What a fucking nightmare. Magnus holds him still as Madzie gathers golden magic between her palms and pushes it down into the snarling automaton. For a brief moment, the warm glow suffuses it with a light that’s almost heavenly.

Then it winks out, and the automaton collapses limply to the floor, unmoving. One small hand drops on the stone at Madzie’s feet; a beveled gold band gleams on her ring finger.

Asher Boudreaux lets out a ragged moan when Magnus finally releases him. He keeps his magic close to the surface in case the boy tries to fight, but he doesn’t; all of that seems to have drained out of him the moment Madzie cut the strings tying the corpse to a false second life. He rocks on his feet, instead, gasping, then scrambles across the room. Madzie starts to lift her hands, magic sparking from her fingertips, but she stops when Magnus shakes his head.

“Give him a moment,” he says quietly. 

She hesitates, then nods, stepping back. Asher falls to his knees on the hard stone and hauls the dead woman into his arms. He strokes her tangled gray hair out of her face, shuts her staring eyes with trembling fingers and then, with a sob, curls around her like he’s been stabbed in the gut, burying his face in her hair.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I tried, I swear I did—”

Magnus steps back, giving him as much privacy as he can under the circumstances. Madzie comes to stand beside him, and he can sense her silent question without even looking over.

“She was his wife,” he says, keeping his voice low, although it’s not likely that Asher will overhear him in his current state anyway. “Hannah. I met her once. A lovely woman.”

“Ah,” is all Madzie says, but when he glances down at her, her stern expression has softened. It makes her look younger, less like the sharp-edged warrior and more like the little girl who used to beg Alec for just one more story at bedtime when she stayed with them. They stand there together in silence as Asher’s sobs stutter into silence, and then Magnus makes his way across the room to kneel beside him, to settle a careful hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“I never wanted—” Asher shakes his head, swiping angrily at his wet cheeks even as fresh tears spill from his eyes. “I just wanted her back.”

“I know.”

“I thought you would understand.”

“I do,” Magnus says, and the worst thing is, he _does._ “I really do. I’m so sorry.”

“Fuck you,” Asher says, but it’s thin and sad, no aggression left in him at all. When Magnus wraps an arm around his shoulders, he collapses against him like something in him has broken, pressing a wet cheek to his shoulder. “You love a mortal, Magnus. How much longer do you think he has left? A few years, if that? What do you think you’ll do when he’s gone?”

Magnus closes his eyes. The twist of grief in the back of his throat is familiar these days, but he swallows it back. He hasn’t lost Alec. Not yet. “Not this.”

“You say that now.”

Magnus sighs. “You’re young,” he says. The first century is always the hardest, or so the wisdom goes. Those first lost mortal loves. Asher isn’t the first warlock to try this particular solution to the problem of mortality, not by a long shot. It’s something Magnus has seen dozens of times and never really understood until recently. “I know it hurts now. It’ll keep hurting for a long time. But believe me, Asher, please believe me: this isn’t the answer. You have to let her go.”

Asher lifts his head to stare at him with eyes that are wet and agonized and burning with something that’s both lost and angry. “And what about you? When Alexander Lightwood dies, will you be able to let him go?”

“I won’t have a choice,” Magnus says, very evenly. It’s a truth he’s been struggling to accept for decades, and saying it out loud feels like cracking his heart open, but it’s the truth all the same. “And neither do you. That’s what it means to love a mortal.”

*

It’s Madzie who eventually manages to get Asher out of the room, wrapped in a conjured blanket and portalled to the loft of some mutual friend in Montpellier. Technically, this kind of spellwork is grounds for being hauled up in front of the local High Warlock and held to account, but Mathilde Clement should have known better to leave him alone in the first place, and at any rate, this particular indiscretion is one that far too many of them have committed. No lasting harm has been done to anything except poor Asher Boudreaux’s heart, which was already broken in any case.

Magnus stands alone in the catacomb, contemplating the body of the late Hannah Boudreaux and trying to settle his thoughts, a task which has never been easy and which has been proving increasingly elusive of late. 

The prickle of portal magic winks out of existence, and then there are quick steps on the stone and Madzie slips back into the room, pats him on the arm with one slender hand. Even quescent, her magic is contained in shifting tattoos and coiled around her long braids, a sparking power that’s as much showmanship as function. Magnus likes to think that he can take at least some of the credit for that; Catarina, for all her incredible power, is as stolidly pragmatic as they come.

The penetrating expression on her face when she looks up at him, though, is all her mother. “Hey. How are you doing?”

“Well.” Magnus shrugs eloquently, finds a smile for her. “I can certainly think of more pleasant ways to spend a Saturday evening.”

“Tell me about it.” She shifts, rolling her shoulders like they ache, and flips her braids back out of her face, magic sparking and settling as they move. “I really appreciate you coming all the way out here on such short notice.”

“Of course. Anything for my favorite young protegé.”

Madzie snorts at that. “I’m seventy-six years old, Magnus.”

“You’re a baby,” he says lightly, but he’s looking at Hannah Boudreaux, her tangled gray hair and soft wrinkled face, and there’s a heaviness in his gut that he can’t quite shove away. “Come back and talk to me once you’ve got a century or two under your belt.”

“Uh huh.” Her voice is very dry. “I can deal with the rest of this. You don’t have to stick around for clean-up. Étienne--you know, from the Matabiau Pack?--he’ll help out if I need it. He owes me a few favors anyway.”

“Oh, sweetpea, you don’t need to—”

Madzie gives him a long, calm look that’s so much like Catarina’s that they could be blood relations. “Magnus. Go home. Go see Alec. I’ll handle this.”

Trust Madzie to see right through him. Magnus grimaces, then slides a hand over his face, like the exhaustion and lingering grief is something he can physically scrape away. “I should, shouldn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Madzie says, and steps close, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing tight. He rests his chin on the top of her head, closes his eyes. He feels ancient, like all the centuries of his long life are carved into his bones where he can feel them even if they can’t be seen. “You really should.”

Magnus huffs a laugh against her hair. “When did you get so grown up, anyway?”

“About fifty years ago,” she says, smiling as she lets him go, “but who’s counting? Go. Give Alec a hug from me. I got this.”

“You always were a bossy child,” Magnus sighs, but he’s smiling too, just a little, as he steps back toward the doorway. He lifts his hands and spins magic across his fingertips, calling up the image of his apartment, of Alec, of _home_.

The last thing he sees as the portal opens up before him is Madzie, crouching down beside the dead woman to wrap her gently in glowing strands of golden magic like a burial shroud.


	2. Chapter 2

Alec is waiting for him when he steps lightly out of thin air onto the carpeted floor of their front hallway, his long frame graceful where it’s leaned against the doorway, lamplight glinting in his silver hair and a pair of drinks in his hands. He surveys Magnus with a thoughtful look in his eyes that means Madzie definitely texted him at some point tonight, but Magnus can’t even bring himself to care. There’s music playing softly in the living room, the open space full of warm lamplight, and something in the kitchen smells fantastic, and the awful tension that’s sunk into his bones dissipates, just a little.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” he says.

Alec snorts, but his eyes are soft. “Right.”

“But I’m glad you did,” Magnus admits. “Especially if you made enough dinner for both of us.”

“Good to know where I rank on your list of priorities,” Alec says dryly, pushing himself off the wall to make his slow, careful way down the hallway as the music switches to another, vaguely familiar tune.

At ninety-three, he retains a kind of charismatic magnetism that has long outlasted his youthful good looks. Or at least, that’s what Magnus hears other people say; he will never not find his Alexander beautiful, but he is admittedly biased. He banishes his boots to the hall closet, then tilts his head, smiling when he recognizes the lyrics. It’s been a long time since he’s heard this particular song. “Feeling nostalgic, darling?”

“I’m old,” Alec says, looking amused, and hands him one of the glasses. “I’m allowed.”

Magnus’s heart thumps sharply in his chest. “Oh, you’re not old.”

Alec grins at that, and it’s the one thing about him that hasn’t changed in all the years that Magnus has known him, that sharp brilliant smile. “Yeah, right. Tell that to my arthritis.”

“Is it bothering you?” Magnus snaps his fingers, banishing his glass for a moment and taking Alec’s hands in his. He rubs the pads of his thumbs over the knotted joints, and Alec curls his fingers, soft on Magnus’s skin, the bowstring calluses of decades past long-faded now. “Let me—”

“Magnus,” Alec interrupts. He doesn’t pull his hands away, but he does bring Magnus’s knuckles to his lips to kiss, pointedly disrupting the flow of magic. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Come on.”

“Alexander.”

“ _Magnus._ ” Alec leans down to kiss him briefly on the mouth, sweet and familiar, then lets go of his hand to reach for the handsomely carved cane propped up against the wall. Even with it, he’s graceful. Slow, but graceful. There’s a steadiness in him that goes deeper than his aging muscles and fragile bones, something that only seems more and more visible in recent years.

He knows what it means, of course, this slow paring-down of everything about Alec that is inessential. It’s just not generally something he lets himself think about, but all of his usual mental compartments seem to have been blown wide open after tonight.

“Stop brooding,” Alec says from the kitchen doorway, “and come help me set the table.”

“I’m not brooding,” Magnus informs him, snapping his fingers and summoning his drink back into his hand, taking a fortifying sip. It’s too weak; seventy years and Alec has never learned how to mix a proper cocktail. Sometimes Magnus suspects him of doing it on purpose. “I never brood. It’s unattractive.”

“On you, it’s very attractive.” Alec leans his cane against the table, bracing one hand on the edge of it as he pulls silverware out of the drawer. “Which is lucky, since that’s definitely what you’re doing right now. What happened?”

“Who said anything happened?”

Alec raises his eyebrows. Metal clinks on porcelain as he sets the fork he’s holding down and makes his way around the table, stopping in front of Magnus and folding his arms. His expression is almost amused. “Madzie messaged me. Nice try.”

“Oh, fine,” Magnus sighs. He downs the rest of the martini in a single gulp, banishes the glass to the kitchen sink, and steps forward into Alec’s space. “Is dinner ready yet?”

“Few more minutes.”

Magnus waves a hand, dropping a stasis spell over the kitchen, freezing the pot on the stove mid-boil. “It can wait. Just.” He settles his palms on Alec’s chest, feeling the warmth of him through his shirt, the steady thump of his heart, the sharp lighting prickle of angelic magic from his runes, and then he tilts his head to kiss him. Thoroughly, this time, and with an edge of heat and promise. “Come to bed with me?”

Alec kisses him back, but when they break apart he gives Magnus a penetrating look, stroking a thumb over his cheekbone, a sweet familiar gesture that makes his throat ache with desperate fondness. “Seriously, Magnus, is something wrong?”

“Of course not,” Magnus scoffs. “Does something need to be wrong for me to want to make love to my husband?”

“Of course not,” Alec echoes, the slight curl of his mouth teasing and sweet. When he leans down to kiss Magnus again, though, there’s a cautious quality to it, as if Magnus is the fragile one here. As if he can tell how close Magnus is right now to shattering. 

He probably can. Alexander has always been able to see right through him, after all. 

Mercifully, he doesn’t ask any more questions. He just twines his fingers around Magnus’s and allows himself to be drawn back through the familiar hallways of their home toward the bedroom.

*

Their lovemaking is slower these days, more careful, without much of the frantic urgency it so often had when they were young. When _Alec_ was young. Magnus was old centuries before the Lightwood name even existed, although he often allows himself to forget that fact.

If he clutches a little too desperately, a little more forcefully than he usually does these days, Alec is kind enough not to mention it. Afterward, Magnus rests his head on his chest and listens to the reassuring sound of his heartbeat. Alec runs one hand up his spine, slow and soothing, and then says, quietly, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Do I have to?” Magnus murmurs, moving his head just slightly to press a kiss to the hollow of Alec’s shoulder where the skin is thin and fragile, the once-powerful muscle gone soft.

“No. But if you want to, I’ll listen.”

“Of course you will. My dear Alexander. I love you, you know.”

“I know,” Alec says, sounding amused. He presses his toes against Magnus’s ankle, a brief affectionate touch, then shifts with a groan and settles his body more comfortably into the mattress, arm curling around Magnus’s back. “I love you too.”

There’s quiet after that for a while, and then Magnus sighs against Alec’s throat and says, “You’re going to lie there and silently judge me until I talk, aren’t you.”

“No,” Alec says again. His chest quakes beneath Magnus’s cheek. He’s laughing. Silently, but he’s laughing, and Magnus loves him so much that he thinks his heart might twist apart in his chest. Seventy years is not nearly enough time. Alec is dying in the slow, awful way that only mortals can die, the last years of his life slipping away like water through Magnus’s cupped fingers and all of eternity yawning empty before him—

_You asked once what I was afraid of_ , he remembers telling Alec, long ago, about a hurt so much smaller. _It’s this._

—and Magnus will lose him, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Nothing at all.

He turns, pressing his face to Alec’s collarbone. Grounding himself.

“The warlock we were tracking,” he says finally. “Asher Boudreaux. He’d stolen a corpse from the morgue and tried a reanimation. Botched it pretty badly, not that there’s any way to do a reanimation like that _right_.”

“I remember.”

“She was his wife,” Magnus says, and Alec stills. “Hannah. She died of heart failure a week and a half ago. They were together for fifty-four years.”

“Magnus—”

Magnus cuts him off. Now that he’s speaking, it’s like he’s lancing a boil; all he can do is keep going until it’s all out of him. “He asked me--I knew him, a little. I think you met him once, the last time we went to visit the Paris Institute. I don’t know if you remember, but--he remembered you. He asked me what I would do, when you’re--when—”

“When I’m dead,” Alec finishes quietly, when it becomes clear that Magnus isn’t going to be able to spit the word out. His hand moves on Magnus’s skin, cups the back of his head carefully. It’s so much like the way Magnus was holding onto that weeping young warlock a few hours ago that for a moment he can’t breathe.

“Yes,” he manages.

“Well,” Alec says, after a silence that seems to stretch on for an age. “I hope you’re not planning on stealing my body from the morgue and reanimating it with demonic magic.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“No,” Alec sighs. “I know it isn’t. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Magnus says raggedly. “I’m an idiot.”

“You’re not.”

“I am. I should be enjoying this, I should be enjoying the time I have with you. I’ve been alive for a long time, Alexander. A very long time. I know better than this. And yet—”

“And yet,” Alec agrees. It’s gentle, like he knows what Magnus is about to say. He probably does. 

“I’ve lost a lot of people. So, so many of them, but you’re the first--you’re the only one I’ve built a life with.”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” Alec says softly. His hands trace soothing shapes on Magnus’s skin. Runes, drawn across his chest and shoulders by the pads of Alec’s fingers before looping away into abstract patterns, the familiar shapes repeating as if Alec can push their alien magic into Magnus’s skin by willpower alone. _Strength. Courage. Protection. Love._ “Several times, in fact.”

“Yeah. Not recently, though.” He’s been avoiding it, if he’s honest. He’s been avoiding it, and Alec has been letting him, because he knows Magnus entirely too well. He takes a breath, filling his chest slowly, like he can push out the hollowness there by strength of will alone. It doesn’t work; it never has, and he can’t even bring himself to talk around the subject like he usually does. All he has left is the unvarnished truth. “I don’t know if I’ll survive losing you.”

“Magnus,” Alec murmurs, and his palm is warm on Magnus’s cheek, and his hazel eyes are earnest, and he is simultaneously the old man that Magnus has spent a lifetime with and the boy he fell in love with all those years ago, and Magnus can’t breathe, he can’t _breathe._ “You’re not losing me. I promise.”

He sounds so steady and confident that for a single perfect moment, Magnus believes him completely. That’s always been Alec’s gift. His clarity of purpose has always seemed like a thing that could shift the edges of reality and bend the world to its shape.

He wants to believe it. Wants it so desperately that it chokes him.

“Don’t—” his voice is small. “Please don’t say that to me.”

“I promise,” Alec says again, devastatingly gentle. He presses a kiss to Magnus’s mouth, to his cheek, to his forehead like a benediction. His broad hand curves around the back of Magnus’s neck like he can hold him there and keep him safe forever.

*

Six months later--a heartbeat later--he’s gone.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s Simon, of all people, who finds him after the funeral.

“Max said you might be here,” he says, letting himself into the bedroom in a spill of golden sunlight, the click of heels on stone, all the familiar sounds of the Institute at mid-week briefing time. The legendary Alexander Lightwood might be dead, but shadowhunter business carries on. “I brought food.”

“Fuck off,” Magnus sighs. It’s not the most diplomatic response, but on the other hand, he’s also not flinging fireballs at Simon’s youthful vampiric face, so really he thinks he ought to be congratulated on his restraint.

“No,” Simon says mildly, and sets the takeout container on the nearest table. It smells like--sushi, Magnus thinks. Edamame and spider rolls, always particular favorites of his. Just the idea of food makes his stomach roll, although it’s been days since he’s eaten. Or slept, for that matter. “Pretty sure you shouldn’t be alone right now. Catarina and Madzie are on their way; for now, you get me. Sorry.”

Magnus draws his knees up to his chest, rumpling the blue comforter beneath him, childish and undignified and unable to care about it in the least. His boots drag dirty marks into the old cotton. The bedclothes smell clean but faintly musty. Alec always kept rooms at the Institute, a habit since he was a wartime general who occasionally needed a secure place to collapse after days of running on empty. Nobody ever bothered to clean them out after he retired, but it’s been years since he actually slept here. Decades, maybe. Everything here is something he chose, the bows on their rack and the pictures on the wall, the stacks of books and the color of the sheets, but there’s no immediate sense of him in these rooms. Not like there is in their loft. It’s familiar enough for comfort, and that’s all.

“And what does the Institute think about the sudden influx of Downworlders in its exalted halls?” Magnus asks. He means it to be sarcastic, but it comes out thin and tired instead.

“Actually, they’ve been kind of treating me like a celebrity,” Simon says, a sort of verbal shrug in his voice. “It’s a little awkward, honestly. But Jocie’s the Head of the Institute, and you know she’d never kick us out, come on. Clary--she trained her well.” His voice falters on Clary’s name. It’s just a brief catch, but it’s enough. Because Simon is young, for an immortal, and it’s been less than five years since they lost Clary. She was the last of them. Other than Alec. 

The New York Institute is outliving them, and Magnus knows better than anyone else still breathing how much they’re existing on forbearance now. These rooms will be stripped soon, and within a decade or two Magnus will stop being Uncle Magnus and once again just be the High Warlock of Brooklyn, summoned for Council meetings and ward maintenance and nothing more. If he’s lucky. He likes to think that the changes Alec and the others made to the Clave will outlive the memory of him, but he’s been alive far too long to count on it. It’s not something he can bring himself to care much about right now, in any case.

“Of course not,” he says flatly.

Simon clears his throat. “They wouldn’t make you leave.”

“They couldn’t if they wanted to.”

“No,” Simon agrees after a moment, reaching for the takeout bags. “I guess they couldn’t. Tempura?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I believe you, I really do, but I’m also pretty sure that if I let you starve, Alec might start physically manifesting in my living room to yell at me, and I am seriously not emotionally prepared for that.” Simon pauses when Magnus drags a gasping breath into his throat at that, looks at him with eyes that are soft and worried and so fucking _young._ “Sorry. Too soon?”

“A little bit,” Magnus manages. He isn’t going to cry in front of Simon. He isn’t. He can at least save it for Catarina, who has already watched him fall apart dozens times over the long course of their lives.

“I’m sorry,” Simon says again, sincerely. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Because when Clary died—”

“ _Simon._ I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” Simon says quietly, busying himself with the takeout bags. He keeps his back to Magnus, affording him that small measure of privacy. His dark hair is slightly disheveled under the embroidered kippah that he’s still wearing. Magnus hasn’t seen him in it since Clary’s funeral. “I just. I’m sorry. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love that much, and it sucks. And I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah,” Magnus whispers. He rubs his left thumb across the band of the one ring he hasn’t taken off for decades, the metal skin-warm and smooth. Its mate is on a chain around his neck, under his shirt, resting above his heart. It should be warm, too, but if feels like a lump of ice against his skin, like the metal that spent decades on Alec’s hand doesn’t remember how to retain a body’s heat without its proper owner. “Yeah. Me too.”

*

Later, much later, he lies alone and fully clothed on Alec’s bed, staring up at the dark ceiling and wondering what the hell he’s doing here. It’s that particular strange silence that only seems to fall around three in the morning, when the world is dark and still and reality seems thinned out, stretched and ready to shatter at a touch.

He should be at Catarina’s. She offered, gently sympathetic when she hugged him on the threshold and didn’t comment on the way he clung too hard and too long and pushed his wet face into her shoulder like a child, like he could hide his tears in the warmth of her body and the strong circle of her arms. Madzie offered, too. So, for that matter, did Simon. There are others he could go to; being immortal means there’s never a dearth of people who have seen you through the absolute worst moments of your life. He has friends. He has people who love him, as cold as that comfort is right now. He has places he could go that are not the god damned New York Institute, with its memories and its ghosts and its scores upon scores of righteous young nephilim, all of whom look at Magnus like he’s a legend walking in the light of day and none of whom is Alec.

And that’s the problem, really. There’s only one thing he needs right now, and it’s the one thing he can’t have.

_My poor, dear fool_ , he imagines Ragnor saying, a long-ago whisper that he can still hear as though his old friend is sitting right beside him. _How you do love to torture yourself._

“Shut up, Ragnor,” Magnus murmurs out loud. He passes a hand over his face, his aching eyes as dry as bone, then folds himself upright on the rumpled sheets, swings his legs off the side of the bed, and stands. He did finally take his boots off, a belated nod to propriety that he really doesn’t give a damn about, and the stone floor is cold on his bare feet. That damned angelic asceticism again. They’ve certainly got the technology to heat this old mausoleum properly these days if they wanted to.

Alec always hated the cold. It was something Magnus loved to tease him about: his big, gruff shadowhunter, who burrowed under piles of blankets and tucked his icy toes into the crook of Magnus’s knees and hunched into his coat resentfully when he had to go outside in the snow, and—

\--and Magnus needs to stop thinking about this right now, or he may actually go insane.

The stained-glass depiction of Raziel on one wall lets in little light, although he can see the waxing moon high in the darkness through one of the other windows. Ghostly patches of color shift on the floor, vanishing when clouds drift across the moon’s face. The corners of the room are swathed in shadows, the uncertain shifting gleam of the seraph blades on the wall phantasmagoric, eerie. Feeling more than a little like a ghost himself, Magnus spins slowly in the middle of the room, arms out. Feels the coldness of the air on his bare palms, on his dry cheeks. He wishes he could weep, but he cried all the tears he had into Catarina’s shoulder earlier, and now he just feels hollow and sore.

And alone. Very, very alone.

“Well?” he says into the darkness. “You said I wouldn’t lose you. You promised, Alexander.”

Silence. Even the city outside is quiet enough this time of night that he can’t hear the ever-present hum of New York City humanity through the thick stone walls of the Institute.

He turns around again, as if Alec is suddenly going to materialize out of the shadows while he isn’t looking. As if even Alexander Lightwood could find a way to turn away from death and march back into Magnus’s life with squared shoulders and blazing eyes like he has so many times before.

Magic sparks at his fingertips, flickers, casting eerie shadows across the dark room. He feels unmoored, baffled as a child at the finality of it all. It’s an unthinkable thing, that Alec can simply _not exist_ , that he’s slipped away from Magnus as irrevocably as his mother did, as Ragnor did, as every person he’s lost in all the centuries of his life has.

There’s a flutter of movement out of the corner of his eye, and Magnus spins, a wild kind of hope jolting in the back of his throat, magic flaring up to cast the room in a brilliant blue light that illuminates--absolutely nothing. The bow rack in the corner, the shifting tree branches outside the window, and nothing more. Magnus swallows, then swallows again, and then, very abruptly, flings the handful of magic he’s still holding at the bow rack, sending it to the floor in a clatter that’s loud enough to wake the dead.

If only.

He curses, low and vicious in a language he hasn’t spoken in centuries, and then banishes the magic and crosses the room the pick up the bow and quiver. It isn’t Alec’s favorite, the one he bartered away to Magnus all those years ago for Isabelle’s freedom; that one is still back at the loft, and Magnus can’t bear to look at it. This one is just a generic weapon from the armory, something Alec probably left here as a backup. The quiver is cracked, the long-neglected bow so dry that it would probably snap in half if someone tried to draw it now.

He stands the rack back up and hangs bow and quiver up again, and then he scrubs both hands over his face, summons his boots, and stalks out of the room without a backward glance.

*

The halls of the Institute are mercifully empty this time of night, and Magnus hasn’t spent a lifetime popping in and out of here at will without learning all the quick and discreet ways out of the building. He doesn’t feel like he’s breathing again until he stumbles out into the chilly darkness, the smell of frost sharp in the air. He stands there for several minutes, breathing in air that feels like ice water in his lungs and letting the cold sink into his skin, before he feels calm enough to twist a portal into being.

There are other entrances to the Silent City, of course; Magnus, being who he is, could probably pass openly through the main gates. Could walk past the Silent Brothers and the cold-eyed statue of Raziel into the stone passages beneath. Even if he was seen, no one would stop him; he’s entirely certain of it.

He doesn’t want to be seen. It’s not particularly in his nature to be quiet and discreet, but he can manage it for this.

He steps through the portal into the center of the catacombs instead, and it winks out behind him in a puff of warm air that sends the ever-present dust swirling. Magnus takes a breath, pulling blue fire into his palms to illuminate the space around him as he lifts his head and surveys the rows upon rows of tombs.

There are so many names here that he would recognize if he looked. So many old friends, enemies, occasional lovers all gone to dust, but there’s only one that can capture his attention now. The most recent plaque is right before his eyes, the flecks of mica in the freshly polished granite glinting in the light. Magnus lets the pads of his fingers trail over the stone where the edges of the letters still cut sharp. 

Alexander Gideon Lightwood. 1994-2088.

A mundane headstone would have more than that. Decorative carvings, perhaps. An inscription, a bit of poetry, something totally insufficient to sketch out the reality of the man who’s buried here, but this is a shadowhunter tomb, and it carries only Alec’s name and the dates that mark the span of his life. Ninety-four years. A long life. A good, long, _mortal_ life. 

An instant. A heartbeat. A moment’s beautiful dream to an immortal. 

He sucks in a shuddering breath, and then another, and before he quite knows how he got there he’s kneeling, the damp floor bleeding cold through the knees of his pants, stone scraping against his palms, and all he can hear is the thunder of his heart, his own sobbing breaths horribly loud in the echoing silence. There’s nothing quiet and discreet about him now and the Silent Brothers who watch over the catacombs must be able to hear him, but no one comes. Maybe they’re used to this; maybe they just don’t give a damn. He’s glad of it either way. He doesn’t think he could stand someone trying to comfort him now.

So of course that’s when a warm hand falls on the back of his neck.

Magnus freezes. He heard no footsteps, felt no prickle of magic across his skin. Between one breath and the next, someone is simply _there_ , curling a broad palm around his nape, stroking long fingers into his hair. Soothing him like he’s a small child and this is all just a nightmare.

Not _someone._ He knows those hands.

“Hey,” Alec’s voice says softly into the still air above him. There’s a strange, echoing quality to it, as if he’s speaking from the far end of a long hallway instead of three feet away, but it is unmistakably him. Magnus breathes in slowly and doesn’t turn. He doesn’t think he could move if a gate to Edom opened up before his eyes right now. “Are you okay?”

The breath comes out in something that’s half-laughter, half-sob, shaky and edged with hysteria. He doesn’t intend to speak, but the words come out too, without permission. “No. What kind of question is that?”

There’s a soft breath of laughter, half-amused and exasperated. It’s one that Magnus has heard a thousand times before and will never hear again, and he squeezes his eyes shut, wetness spilling down his cheeks. Apparently he had some tears left after all.

“Sorry,” Alec offers.

“Sorry? _You’re_ sorry?” Magnus does laugh at that, raggedly. “Please don’t be. You’re the one who’s dead.” He couldn’t say it months ago, the last time he and Alec spoke of it. But what fear is there in the word now, when he’s living through the reality of it?

He finds that he can move after all, pushing the heel of one hand into his eyes and reaching up blindly with the other. Warm fingers curl around his, and it’s both the best and the worst thing that he’s felt since four days ago, when Alec’s heart stopped beating beneath his palm, when his last breath rasped against Magnus’s throat and he did not draw another. Magnus grips him tight and murmurs, “I wish you were really here.”

“Magnus,” Alec sighs, and then there’s a shift of cloth as he drops down beside Magnus with the kind of thoughtless agility that the real Alec hadn’t had in decades. His palm lands on Magnus’s cheek, and even knowing that it isn’t real Magnus can’t help but lean into it. He opens his eyes for just a moment, just enough to see the dark shock of Alec’s hair and the lines of his face, blurry and distorted by tears, and then he shuts them again as Alec leans forward and kisses him.

_I wish you were really here_ , Magnus thinks, and _I love you,_ and _I already miss you more than I thought I could miss another person, of all the people I’ve lost, you were—_

The kiss breaks. Alec shifts back, the transitory--illusory--warmth of his body fading.

“Magnus,” he says again, and that hollow quality is back, overwhelming the familiar tones of his voice, distorting them almost beyond recognition. “Magnus, I—”

There’s nothing after that. Just silence, a void so empty that it aches.

When he opens his eyes again, Alec is gone.

Magnus takes a breath, lets it out, presses his palms to the rough stone floor. The empty hallway wavers in his field of vision like he’s looking at it through a rain-drenched window. Alec is gone; or, more accurately, Alec was never here in the first place. He’s exhausted and grieving and kneeling in the city of the dead; is it any wonder that his weary mind would conjure up a ghost to comfort him? It’s not even the cruelest thing his subconscious has ever done to him, although it’s up there.

It takes him a long time to get to his feet, but eventually, he manages it. Eventually he stands, wiping away the tears with trembling fingers, straight-backed and stiff even though there’s no one there to see him. He presses his fingers to the carved letters of Alec’s name for just a moment longer, and then he turns, yanking open a portal to somewhere far away from here.

*

_What do you think you’ll do when he’s gone?_ Asher Devereaux asked him, before all this, and the answer is both simple and terrible:

He’ll endure, because he has no other choice.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was originally going to be the last chapter, but it got a little unwieldy, so I'm splitting it.

Another century, another war. It seems to be the one constant of his existence.

The evacuation is well underway when the call comes in from the front, and by that time it’s too late. He hears Catarina curse beside him, the strain of holding the portal open showing in her voice; an instant later, the hoard of Ravener demons starts pouring over the crest of the hill a few miles away, clearly visible through the scrying spells, and there’s no time. There’s no time. Magnus propels the last family through his portal with an ungentle burst of magic, then shuts it and grabs the nearest unoccupied warlock, a spindly young man with horns that he doesn’t recognize.

“Portal to the safehouse,” he snaps, “hold it open as long as you can,” and then he’s ripping open his own portal in the opposite direction. There are too many civilians here, crowded close and waiting for evacuation. It’s too close. He has to stop them before they get here.

“Magnus,” Catarina shouts, her voice nearly lost in the screams and the panic, the whirling vortexes of a dozen portals, but Magnus doesn’t look back as he steps through the portal and away. If he looks at Catarina, he’s going to hesitate, and they don’t have time for that.

He comes out almost on top of the horde, and it’s only by hard-earned reflexes that he keeps from being decapitated immediately. His shield manifests with enough force to knock the nearest dozen flying, and part of the horde turns their attention toward him, but it’s not enough. Most of them are still heading for the valley, for the rest of the refugees, and he can’t fight all of them off one at a time. He doesn’t have the power or the time for that.

Shit.

Well, there is one other option. Magnus takes a deep breath, tasting sulfur and rot, and lifts his hands, pulling into the depths of the already depleted wellspring of magic within him. The world fades, turns gray and distant, and then power crashes through him like a cresting wave, a roar that drowns out even the howling demons. For a few breathless seconds, everything around him turns to light.

He falls.

His shield pops out of existence like a soap bubble, but that doesn’t matter because there’s nothing left to attack him. The hillside around him is a blackened, smoking ruin, the bodies of the demons nearly unidentifiable. Just charred corpses as far as the eye can see. In the far distance, he can see the flickering blue light of the portals, and then blackness crowds his vision, his knees folding beneath him, his cheek hitting the hot stone and sending ashes swirling before his eyes.

Darkness shreds around him. He’s too aware of the sound of his own breathing, his own heartbeat too slow and too loud in his ears. He tries to stand and can’t. Tries to roll over, and can’t.

 _I’m sorry, Catarina_ , he thinks. She’s going to be furious with him. He didn’t even say goodbye.

The effort of dragging air into his lungs is too much. He drained himself too far, drew the well of magic in him dry, and now his body is collapsing, devouring itself. Fading.

Dying, possibly. Probably.

His eyes slip closed to the sound of sudden quick footsteps approaching, the sound of his own name echoing as though heard from the far end of a long tunnel.

“-- _agnus. Magnus, stay with me. Magnus.”_ And then, suddenly, the voice is very close, and not echoing at all. “Magnus, stay with me.”

“Alexander,” he mumbles. His tongue feels thick in his mouth, the familiar syllables slurring to incomprehensibility.

Warm hands cup his face, and that warm, impossible voice says, “Just hang on, Magnus. Hang on. I’ve got you.”

Magnus reaches up with clumsy fingers. Brushes skin, soft hair and the delicate shell of an ear. The familiar curve of a strong jaw. “Alexander. Alexander. I’m dying.”

He’s speaking Malay, he realizes vaguely. Alec won’t understand him. He licks dry lips to try again, but before he can, the man--Alexander, it’s his Alexander leaning over him, soft and worried in the darkness, and younger than he ought to be besides--tilts his chin up and says, very firmly, “You’re not dying. Okay? Don’t say that.”

He can’t really be here, then. Of course not. He never is. Still, Magnus has never been able to deny him, and apparently that holds true even for his shade, this beautiful hallucination here to comfort him at the end.

“Okay,” he mumbles--English this time, or at least he thinks it is--and warm arms slide beneath him as he’s lifted away from the smoking ground, cradled against a familiar body that smells like lightning.

His eyes slip shut, and the world slides away from him into darkness.

*

He wakes, somewhat surprisingly, in the camp infirmary with a red-headed young warlock leaning over him.

“Oh, good,” she says. “You’re back.”

“I.” Magnus blinks, lifts a hand that feels as heavy as lead to rub at his eyes. “What?”

“Back with us, I mean. It’s been most of a day. Catarina Loss--she says she knows you? _Badass,_ by the way, she’s my fucking hero--anyway, she said to let you know that she’s okay and somebody named Madzie is okay, and they’re relocating to, like, the Moroccan front and they want you to join them as soon as you can make a portal, and also that she’s going to kick your ass when you get there for pulling that dumb suicidal stunt. Her words, not mine. Might be a while,” she adds, spinning a ball of warm yellow magic and pressing it to his heart. The pleasant honey feel of healing power seeps into his veins, a slow spreading warmth. “You were pretty far gone when they brought you in. For a while there it was all we could do to keep your heart going.”

Magnus blinks up at her, baffled by the quick flow of words. Everything seems foggy and distant, his body leaden, his thoughts fragmented and slow. It’s been--God, centuries since he’s drained himself like this. It was a stupid, borderline-suicidal move, and Catarina is going to murder him for it. But Cat’s okay. Cat and Madzie, they’re okay. That relaxes something in him. “The rest of the camp?”

“All good, man.” The young medic flashes him a quick grin. “You took out every last one of those motherfuckers before they got within a mile of us. Look, I know Catarina is pissed, but you’re like a fucking hero around here. They’re gonna be lining up to buy you drinks once you’re on your feet. And that shadowhunter, if anybody can track him down. They don’t like to stick around, do they?”

“Who?” Magnus groans, levering himself upright. “What are you talking about?”

“The guy who brought you in,” the medic says, and pushes him gently back down onto the bed. Magnus could fight it, but his muscles feel like they’re made out of rubber, his head sore and scattered, his magic fizzing and sparking like poorly channeled electricity, so he relents, sinking back into the pillows with nothing more than a grimace for form’s sake.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Who brought me in? I thought--” He thought he was dead, honestly. It’s not that he isn’t glad to be wrong, but he still doesn’t understand how this happened. Because what his fuzzy, disjointed memories are telling him--that’s not possible.

“Some shadowhunter,” the medic repeats, running a free hand through her shock of red hair and gathering sparks of magic absently in her palm. She’s young, for a warlock, her sharply pointed ears covered in tufted fur the same unlikely shade of red as her hair, unglamoured even in the middle of the infirmary. That’s half of what gives her away. Most of the younger warlocks he’s met recently don’t bother hiding their Marks. It makes him feel ancient, but she seems competent enough, despite the chatter. “Tall, dark hair. Kinda cute, if that’s your thing.” Her wrinkled nose makes it clear that it isn’t hers. “Nobody I recognized, but the blessed fucking nephilim don’t exactly mingle with the rest of us, do they? Why, you know him?”

“No,” Magnus murmurs. He blinks, trying to get some moisture back into his aching eyes. There are shreds of memory hanging in his mind: Alec leaning over him, Alec speaking his name in a soft, worried voice, Alec lifting him into his arms like he hasn’t been dead for more than half a century. “No, I suppose not.”

It wasn’t him. Of course not.

 _Some shadowhunter._ He probably owes the man, whoever he is, his life. It’s entirely childish and ungrateful of him to be glad that he didn’t stick around to be thanked, but he is, all the same.

_Hang on, Magnus. Just hang on. I’ve got you._

It wasn’t him. It never is. He’s been haunted by Alec’s ghost in the decades since his death, by the shift of shadows in empty rooms and the occasional glimpse of a tall, broad-shouldered form out of the corner of his eye, in a crowd. It's never been him, though. It's never been real.

He wishes he could resent that stubborn grieving part of his mind that refuses to let go and allow Alec to slip into his past along with everyone else he’s loved and lost in all the long centuries of his life. Tuck the omamori charm and the wedding ring he still wears into a box with all the rest of his memories, let them become something to be taken out and cherished when he’s feeling wistful; let Alec’s death become just another scar and not this ever-present open wound that aches and bleeds and does not heal.

Alec once told him that nephilim loved truly only once. At the time, Magnus wasn’t sure he believed it. It seemed like an unspeakably cruel irony to inflict on a people built for endless war. As if the constant threat of loss wasn’t bad enough; to have no ability to move on…

He knows better now. It was true, at least for Alec, and in recent years Magnus has begun to wonder if being loved so fiercely by a nephilim has infected him with that same permanence of feeling. That same stubborn inability to let go. It’s a dangerous thing for an immortal to become so mired in the past, and he knows that, and yet still he clings.

“You can go back to sleep if you want,” the medic says, breaking into his thoughts. Magnus blinks at her, and she apparently misinterprets the dazed expression on his face, because she pats his shoulder with the gentle care of someone handling a child or an invalid. Which, okay, the latter description is more or less accurate. “Seriously, dude, you drained yourself dry. Sleep is the best thing for you right now.”

He wants to argue, but honestly, she’s probably right. And his tenuous grasp on consciousness is already slipping. Something moves in the shadows of the infirmary tent, but Magnus closes his eyes before he can watch it resolve into the shape of a tall, beautiful, hazel-eyed ghost.

As he slips back down into sleep, he could almost swear he hears the shape of his name, a soft breath of a whisper in the quiet.

*

All told, he sleeps for nearly three solid days, which is actually kind of a blessing, considering how besieged he is by embarrassingly grateful refugees in every waking moment.

The shadowhunter who rescued him never does turn up. Magnus refuses to allow himself to think about it, and a week later he relocates to the Moroccan front, to be hugged and thoroughly scolded by Catarina and Madzie in turn, and everything is okay again, or as okay as it ever is for him.

Shadowhunters move around, especially during wartime. The man was probably just a temporary placement at the local Institute, transferred on before Magnus woke up. There’s nothing mysterious about it at all.

“I don’t understand why you’re being so stubborn about this,” Catarina says from the other side of the makeshift apothecary. Her hands are quick and steady as she peels and chops and mixes, healing magic sparking above the bowl. Magnus is perfectly well-aware that she only started this conversation while they’re both mid-brew to minimize the likelihood of him storming off halfway through, and he admires the tactical acumen of that move even if it makes him want to throw something.

“I’m not being stubborn,” he says, very pointedly not looking at her as he measures out a careful scoop of dragon scales. “I’m being realistic.”

“You were rescued by some tall, dark-haired _shadowhunter_ that nobody in the camps recognized, who disappeared without a trace afterward, and you still won’t even consider the possibility that—”

“No!” Magnus slams his scoop down, scattering dragon scales across the tabletop and singeing the stained wood surface. “No, I won’t. And do you know why? Because Alexander is dead, Catarina. He’s dead. He’s been dead for almost fifty-three years. I’m never going to see him again, I’ve accepted that.” He hasn’t, though. God, he really hasn’t, and they both know it. He draws a ragged breath and finally meets her sympathetic gaze. She hasn’t even flinched during his little tirade. “I have to accept that. I can’t afford to delude myself about this.”

“Even we don’t know everything there is to know about the veil between worlds. There have been a few accounts of--”

Magnus closes his eyes. “Catarina,” he says. His voice is shaking slightly. “Please. I know you’re trying to help, but please. Just drop it.”

Very gently, she says, “All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s delusional to hope.”

“Cat—”

“I’ll leave it alone.” She reaches across the table to squeeze his hand, and he sighs, and doesn’t pull away.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TBH I'm not entirely happy with how this came out, but... well, here it is anyway.

He tries to avoid the topic, but Catarina’s words itch at him, burrow beneath his skin.

For a while, they’re distracted by the latest influx of demons on the Mediterranean, and Magnus has his hands full mitigating the damage. He’s no war general, but he’s old and powerful and well-connected, and he’s never really been very good at keeping his nose out of trouble when there’s a possibility he can help.

It’s June when they finally manage to seal the portal in a sunken ship, and after that it’s a few months of cleanup and mourning and celebration, the endless dance that he’s done a few thousand times before. He doesn’t know if it’s just because he’s tired and busy, but it’s also the longest time his mind has gone without conjuring up Alec’s ghost, and it should be comforting.

It isn’t, but it should be.

It’s August when he tells Catarina about it, rambling drunk and more than a little weepy, tugging on the omamori charm that he usually keeps tucked into his shirt, and she sighs, and puts him to bed, and in the morning she cures his headache with a gentle touch and says the thing that they’ve both been thinking since that day on the battlefield. “I think it’s time you went back home.”

“I am home,” Magnus tells her. “I have a gorgeous villa a mile from here, you’ve been there—”

“You know damn well what I mean,” she interrupts, very gently. “I’m not going to spend the rest of eternity watching you do this to yourself, Magnus. If you really, truly believe that he’s gone and he’s not coming back, then you have find a way to let him go. Go back to New York. Say goodbye.”

Magnus rubs his thumb over the inside of his wedding ring, an absent, self-soothing gesture. His chest feels bruised, fragile and hollow like his ribs are made of glass, and the breath he takes feels jagged. “I don’t know how to do that, Cat. Don’t you think I’ve tried?”

“I think you’re hurting yourself,” she tells him. “And it hurts me to watch it. And I think you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met, and if you really want to find a way, you will.” She touches his shoulder, gently. "But I meant it when I told you that it isn't wrong to hope."

*

He goes back to New York, eventually. The city has changed in the decades he’s been away; for the better, mostly, although parts of Manhattan are now permanently underwater. He wonders if whoever is doing the wards on the Institute these days has devised a way of keeping the lower levels of the basement dry, or if the nephilim have just given up on that entirely. They’re not really in the business of dragging Downworlders into their secret torture chambers these days; maybe it’s just as well if the sublevels and all the bloody history they represent vanish beneath the rising tide.

He doesn’t visit, although he’d probably be welcome. Magnus Bane is an old friend of the Institute, after all; it’s a far cry from his reputation of a hundred and fifty years ago, but time does change things.

Some things. Even as different as the city is, even as long as it’s been, it still hurts to be back.

He whiles away a few days exploring old haunts, but even that is depressing as hell. His favorite Ethiopian restaurant has been torn down, as has his old loft. The new skyways glimmer like spiderwebs with translucent solar panels, and everything is so much cleaner than he remembers. It feels a bit like coming back to London a few decades after Bazalgette’s new sewers were installed; he almost finds himself missing the familiar stink.

After a week, though, he finally runs out of ways to stall. He makes his way back to one of the Downworld entrances to the Silent City. New York may have moved on, her bones shifting like those of a sleeping giant, but some things don’t change so easily, and the gate beneath a crumbling overpass is still exactly where he remembers. No need to portal in this time and hide from the guardians. He’s been living with this grief for half a century. He can control himself.

None of the Silent Brothers make a move to intercept him as he passes, and he’s grateful for that. It takes five minutes on foot to make his way down to the catacombs, but he moves unerringly. There’s no way he could forget the route if he tried, and he has tried.

He stops before the plaque, settles his hand against the stone. It’s dusty beneath his fingers. Cool. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but there’s no sense of Alec here. It’s just a tomb, dusty and dry and cold. Empty of everything that matters.

“Catarina says that I have to find a way to let you go,” he says softly, eventually. “She’s right, you know. I can’t keep doing this to myself. I just. I don’t know how.” He runs his fingers along the edges of the carved letters, tracing out Alexander’s name by feel. “I spent a long time being angry at you. After what you promised--I know you were just trying to make me feel better, but I still… God. I wanted so badly to believe it that I almost convinced myself.” He breathes in shakily, and drops his hand. “I miss you. I miss you so, so much and I don’t know how to stop.”

Because really, that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? There’s a hole in his world shaped like Alec, and he has yet to find a way to fill it in.

*

At his ludicrously expensive hotel that evening, he sits out on a private balcony overlooking the city. From a distance, it doesn’t look all that different than it did when he and Alec lived here together, and that makes the gleaming modernity of the hotel even more jarring. Probably, he should have just portalled back to his villa in Polignano a Mare, where there are at least a few buildings left standing that are older than he is, but he still feels sad and unsettled enough that portalling halfway across the world probably isn’t the best idea right now.

Anyway, he’s here to let the past go. Not that that seems to be working so far.

Magnus sighs and slides his wedding ring off. It’s a warm familiar weight in his palm, gleaming softly in the dim mood lighting that’s hidden in solar plants around the edge of the railings. Its mate--Alec’s ring--still rests on a chain above his heart. After a moment of consideration, he unfastens the chain and slips his ring onto it as well. It’s not quite his box of memories, but it is… something. Baby steps, he thinks. Cat would be proud of him. He hooks the chain back around his throat and clasps it back together. The two rings clink together as they come to rest against his skin. Magnus wraps his fingers around them, gripping tight. Closes his eyes, as if in prayer, and doesn’t pray.

Then he summons the most expensive bottle of whiskey he can detect in the nearest square mile and proceeds to get methodically, profoundly drunk.

He’s nearing the dregs of the bottle and the entire world seems pleasantly fuzzy when he hears footsteps on the stone. Which is impossible, of course, since this hotel doesn’t exactly lend out room key-codes and even if they did, Magnus’s standard wards would be enough to keep intruders at bay, or at least warn him of their presence. Ergo, there’s only one person it could possibly be, and conveniently he’s not even actually here at all. Magnus rolls his head back in against his chair, smiles lazily, closes his eyes. There’s a numb, awful kind of heartbreak in his chest, but it feels distant under all the alcohol. “Hello, Alexander. Fancy seeing you here.”

“Magnus,” says Alec’s voice, and his footsteps are getting closer, moving around his chair to stop in front of him. The air shifts around him, prickling like a coming storm. A hesitation, and then, in a carefully non-judgemental tone that Magnus could have sworn he’d forgotten, “You’re drunk.”

“Observant as always, my love,” Magnus murmurs. “If you were really here, you could drag me off to bed with a good scolding. Alas…” He reaches out without opening his eyes, fingers closing around the cool shape of his glass. He brings it to his lips, drinks deeply, then says, “You’re only a tragic figment of my imagination, so I’m free to finish off this bottle and then pass out where I sit without judgement if that’s what I feel like doing. But I do thank you for your company all the same.”

“You’re an incredible pain in the ass,” Alec says mildly.

“Oh, _rude_ ,” Magnus says, and drinks again. The whiskey burns pleasantly across his tongue. He feels awful, ancient and heartbroken and bickering with a long-dead hallucination, but he’s almost drunk enough for it not to matter. Almost. “You’re not even here. I don’t need to listen to this.”

“Magnus,” Alec says again, and then he makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, and the glass is suddenly sliding upward out of Magnus’s grip as if gravity just reversed itself.

Without entirely meaning to, he opens his eyes.

He doesn’t really expect anyone to be there, is the thing. This is not the first--or for that matter, the hundredth--time he’s gotten drunkenly maudlin over missing Alexander in the past fifty years, nor is it the first time he’s heard Alec speak to him while he was deep in his cups. But there’s never been anyone there when he opened his eyes. A phantom touch, the echo of a familiar voice: nothing more. Until now.

Alec is standing in front of him, half-full glass in one hand and a worried expression on his face. He looks perfectly solid, perfectly real, and Magnus feels the air leave his lungs like he’s been punched.

“Oh,” he says in a very small voice.

The last time he saw Alec was—

\-- _lying in state on the bier, white-clad shadowhunters all around and the thin shroud that wasn’t quite enough to obscure those familiar, beloved features—_

_\--leaning over him in the darkness of a battlefield and telling him to hold on--_

The last time he saw Alec, he was elderly and frail, silver-haired, his face softened with wrinkles, his strength nearly gone as he clung to Magnus, as he whispered, _“I love you, I love you, I love you_ ,” over and over like he was trying to say it enough to sustain Magnus through all the long years without him. The last time he saw Alec, he was the old man Magnus had loved for a lifetime.

This version seems almost a stranger. This is Alec as he first met him: tall, dark-haired and unlined, all of twenty-two years old with the brief spark of mortal life still burning hot and bright inside him. He might actually be wearing the exact same clothes from that long-ago night in Pandemonium. Soft dark shirt and combat pants and boots, all of it so old-fashioned that it’s almost jarring. Magnus hadn’t realized he remembered it so clearly.

He closes his eyes again, feels sudden moisture prick at their corners. “Please go away.”

“You don’t want that,” Alec says mildly. He sounds fond and exasperated, the way he always used to when Magnus was being ridiculous. Magnus always loved that tone. He frequently went out of his way to be ridiculous just to evoke it.

“No, of course not,” he rasps. He’s never been able to lie to Alec, not when it mattered. “But you’re not really here.”

There’s silence at that, just long enough for grief to twist sharply in his throat, as fresh and raw as if the wound was still new, and then a sigh, footsteps on the floor. The glass clinks softly as it’s set down on the side table. Magnus squeezes his eyes shut tighter, but it doesn’t help. He can smell Alec, the sandalwood soap he used for the last seven decades of his life overlaying the scorched-iron scent of angelic magic. It takes all of his willpower not to reach out.

“I’m really here.”

“ _Please._ ”

A hand settles in his hair and strokes it back from his face, bowstring calluses catching on the fine strands in a way that’s heartbreakingly familiar. It doesn’t matter that it’s been more than half a century since he’s felt it; Alec’s hands are still as familiar as his own. It’s no wonder his grieving, drink-addled mind can conjure their touch out of shadows and dust.

Behold Magnus Bane: immortal fool with an infinite talent for tormenting himself.

Alec sounds thoughtful when he says, “I don’t know how to convince you, Magnus.”

“You can’t,” Magnus sighs, and turns his face into the touch, unable to deny himself this much at least. Long fingers cup his jaw, carefully, delicately, as if he’s something precious. Magnus feels his lips tug into a reluctant smile. “But I’m glad to see you all the same.”

“You’re being difficult.” He can hear the smile in Alec’s voice without opening his eyes, so he doesn’t.

“I’m always difficult. It’s part of my charm.”

“True.” Alec’s fingers smooth over his cheeks, and then he drops his hand to take Magnus’s. His grip is firm, like he’s trying to press the truth of himself into Magnus’s skin. “What would it take to make you believe me?”

Hope feels like a bite at the back of his throat, burning and sharp. It takes him a moment to get the words out. “I’ll believe in you if you stay. If you’re still here in the morning, when I’m awake and sober, then I’ll believe you. And then you can tell me what took you so damn long. It’s been fifty years, Alexander. _Fifty years._ ”

“I know. I’m sorry. Time…” Alec sighs, and there’s something so terribly familiar about it. It’s not just the sight of his beautiful archer grasping awkwardly for the right words--Alec’s _modus operandi_ always tended more toward blunt sincerity than poetic eloquence--it’s that Magnus is suddenly quite sure he’s had this conversation before, or something very like it. Time: always such a touchy subject for immortals. He and Alec had their share of fights about it back in the day. It’s odd to find himself on this end of it. “Time works differently, when you’re dead.”

“Oh, so you admit you’re dead, then?”

“Should I not?” Alec’s eyebrows jump, almost amused. “We both know better.”

“It’ll make it harder to convince me you’re really here.”

“Even warlocks don’t know everything there is to know about the veil between worlds,” Alec says, in an echo of Catarina’s words that’s only uncanny if it’s really him saying them. “It’s not easy to cross back over, especially when the person you come back for seems bound and determined to keep pretending you don’t exist. It took me a long time to manage it.” He smiles slightly. "The trick is having someone immortal who still loves you. Who still--holds onto you. And you did, didn't you? Even when you wished you didn't."

“If you’re trying to make me feel bad, I don’t,” Magnus says, shaky and entirely dishonest. “I’m still not at all convinced you’re real.”

“I know,” Alec says, “but you’re actually looking at me for a change. It’s a start. Come on.” He tugs at Magnus’s hand, and Magnus allows himself to be pulled up to his feet. He sways, standing, and Alec’s hands steady him. “Let’s get you to bed.”

Magnus thinks about resisting, but it’s already way too late for that. He lets Alec lead him back into the room; he lets Alec coax him out of his clothes and under the covers, and then he takes Alec’s hand and hauls him down into the bed, curling into his transitory heat. Alec twists, kicking his boots off, then settles, a comfortable, familiar motion. “Do you believe me yet?”

“No,” Magnus says. His head is spinning, his thoughts vague. He could--probably should--sober up before he sleeps; the hangover is already going to be monstrous. But he doesn’t want to risk it. Just once more, he wants to fall asleep with Alec by his side. He’ll give himself this. Just once. “I miss you. So much.”

“I’m right here.”

“No, you’re not,” Magnus sighs.

“Magnus,” Alec says softly. He shifts closer, dips his head. Warm breath on his lips for an instant, and then Alec is kissing him, so slowly and carefully that Magnus feels something within him shatter irrevocably. It seems a lifetime later--a heartbeat later--when Alec finally pulls back. “I’m right here.”

“No.”

“I promise. I’ll be right here.” His fingers brush Magnus’s cheeks softly, wiping away tears, and it’s only then that he realizes he’s weeping. He doesn’t answer. Can’t answer. All the words he could possibly say are lodged in the back of his throat, but he pushes his face against Alec’s throat anyway, breathes in the scent of sandalwood and spent lightning.

He holds on as tightly as he can, and he _hopes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading; if you enjoyed this story, I'd love to hear from you!
> 
> I can also be found on [Tumblr](http://glorious-spoon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/glorious_spoon)


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